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Promotion and tenure (P&T) remain the central tenets of academia. The criteria for P&T both create and reflect the mission of an institution. The discipline of biomedical engineering is built upon the invention and translation of tools to address unmet clinical needs. ‘Broadening the bar’ for P&T to include efforts in innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology-based transfer (I/E/T) will require establishing the criteria and communication of methodology for their evaluation. We surveyed the department chairs across the fields of biomedical and bioengineering to understand the state-of-the-art in incorporation, evaluation, and definition of I/E/T as applied to the P&T process. The survey results reflected a commitment to increasing and respecting I/E/T activities as part of the P&T criteria. This was balanced by an equally strong desire for improving the education and policy for evaluating I/E/T internally as well as externally. The potential for ‘broadening the bar’ for P&T to include I/E/T activities in biomedical engineering may serve as an example for other fields in engineering and applied sciences, and a template for potential inclusion of additional efforts such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into the pillars of scholarship, education, and service. 

Over the past two decades Biomedical Engineering has emerged as a major discipline that bridges societal needs of human health care with the development of novel technologies. Every medical institution is now equipped at varying degrees of sophistication with the ability to monitor human health in both non-invasive and invasive modes. The multiple scales at which human physiology can be interrogated provide a profound perspective on health and disease. We are at the nexus of creating “avatars” (herein defined as an extension of “digital twins”) of human patho/physiology to serve as paradigms for interrogation and potential intervention. Motivated by the emergence of these new capabilities, the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, the Departments of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and Bioengineering at University of California at San Diego sponsored an interdisciplinary workshop to define the grand challenges that face biomedical engineering and the mechanisms to address these challenges. The Workshop identified five grand challenges with cross-cutting themes and provided a roadmap for new technologies, identified new training needs, and defined the types of interdisciplinary teams needed for addressing these challenges. The themes presented in this paper include: 1) accumedicine through creation of avatars of cells, tissues, organs and whole human; 2) development of smart and responsive devices for human function augmentation; 3) exocortical technologies to understand brain function and treat neuropathologies; 4) the development of approaches to harness the human immune system for health and wellness; and 5) new strategies to engineer genomes and cells.